The creation of location maps is an essential step of mapmaking and compulsory in almost all businesses:

from traditional/paper cartography where used as ancillary to a main map, it helps locating and visualizing the position/limits of this last…

to marketing/digital publications where used as standalone schematic maps designed to easily locate one’s business.

Googling for getting the needed input data might be a nightmare for the cartographer as the Web is awash in free GIS datasets whatever the country, thematic, display level, but very often with poor geometric accuracy and semantic completeness.
Natural Earth provides one of the richest and most consistent GIS vector dataset in ESRI Shapefile format, for free usage. Let’s see what we can do with it.

Using powerful queries and smart labeling systems in addition to state-of-the-art graphic representation functions, LorikSoftware permits to make the most of this dataset.
The above representation only takes 10 seconds to be created and no interactive editing is needed!
As Natural Earth is a worldwide cover, the location map you’re looking for is one click away from you!

You want to integrate your own data on the location map, for locating your office/shop network, your project, no probs… just play the transfer again and all texts’ positions will be computed again automatically without conflict between them:

The location map integrates a region boundary with its label: surrounding cities’ position automatically computed again

The location map integrates a point of interest (Marseille-Provence airport): surrounding cities’ position automatically computed again. Texts can be automatically abbreviated using pre-defined dictionaries